The Green Studio Handbook

Environmental Strategies for Schematic Design

Alison G Kwok, Walter Grondzik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317228639
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

The Green Studio Handbook remains an essential resource for design studios and professional practice. This extensive and user-friendly tool presents practical guidelines for the application of green strategies during the schematic design of buildings. Students and professionals can quickly get up to speed on system viability and sizing. Each of forty-three environmental strategies includes a brief description of principles and concepts, step-by-step guidance for integrating the strategy during the early stages of design, annotated tables and charts to assist with preliminary sizing, key issues to consider when implementing the strategy, and pointers to further resources. Ten new in-depth case studies illustrate diverse and successful green buildings integrated design projects and how the whole process comes together This third edition features updated tables and charts that will help to save energy, water, and material resources during the early stages of design. More than 500 sketches and full-color images illustrate how to successfully apply strategies. A glossary, a project index listing 105 buildings in 20 countries, updated tables and drawings, and I-P and SI units increase the usefulness of The Green Studio Handbook.

CHAPTER 1
GREEN

Green is an important word—it represents one-third of the main title of this book. More critically, green is an important adjective—it accurately describes the limits of what a resource such as this book can rationally and honestly address at this point in time. Green is worthy of discussion.

It would have been easy to name this book The Sustainable Studio Handbook. Sustainable, unfortunately remains undefined by the design community in any day-to-day operational sense. There is no way (even today) to rationally demonstrate that a building is sustainable. It is, however, woefully easy to claim so. We do not want this book to contribute to the essentially meaningless babble about “sustainable” features,“sustainable” systems, and/or “sustainable” buildings that is so common in design circles today. We do want to contribute to the ability of designers to produce high-performance green buildings. Sustainability will (and must) come—but it must do so rationally and not through self-assured and totally mistaken declarations of victory that would make the Federal Trade Commission cringe.

1.1 Exploring intentions with an initial gestural sketch. ALEX WYNDHAM

Green building design, on the other hand, is a fairly well-defined and understood concept. This has not always been the case, but the development and ready adoption of numerous transparent rating systems (such as LEED, Green Globes, the Building Research Establishment’s BREEAM, Smart Homes, Built Smart, EcoHomes, ASHRAE Standard 189, the International Green Construction Code, and others) have allowed the design professions to use the term “green” with confidence and assurance. This confidence extends to discussions with clients and the general public. If a project is claimed to be green, “prove it” would be a reasonable client request. Such proof may be burdensome and expensive to assemble, but the quest for verification—against a generally respected national or international benchmark—is not an impossible task.

We define a green building as one that complies with the minimum requirements for certification under one of the several available green building rating systems (such as those noted above). Sustainable buildings are another story. Sustainable is still over the horizon—aspirational, but not operational.

Relative to green buildings, which rating system is used is not of too much importance. This book is not intended to directly assist in the building certification process; it is intended to assist with the design of more environmentally-responsive buildings. Having said this, however, it is useful to discuss green building certifications in order to get a feeling for this powerful force that is causing a serious rethink of building design and performance.

Green Building Rating Systems

Introduction. How does a designer decide which strategies to use? How green will a proposed project be? How can design and construction practices be changed to produce greener buildings—that may eventually lead to everhigher performance and eventually sustainability? Rating systems can offer design guidance, serve as a decision-making tool, provide metrics by which to assess environmental impact, and act as a lever for change. Used skillfully, rating systems can promote a more integrated design process, reduce environmental impacts and life-cycle costs, and prompt major changes in the building industry. But like any powerful tool, rating systems can be used clumsily or be misunderstood. In such instances they may lead to unrealistic expectations, added project costs and complexity, and may be blamed (instead of the design team) when a building does not perform as expected.

Just as designers grapple with the emerging technologies and long-standing strategies described in this book, they also grapple with the evolving language and shifting requirements of green building rating systems. As strategies are evaluated for their suitability for a given project, so may the framework provided by a particular rating system be evaluated for applicability to a particular project.

Rating Systems Context. Since the Code of Hammurabi, written around 2000 BCE, laws have governed some aspects of building as a means of protecting human life. Architects and engineers are legally bound to protect the public’s health, safety, and welfare, and governments have adopted codes that define exactly how this is to be achieved. To some extent such codes have made our buildings greener by requiring ventilation, windows, or insulation and prohibiting certain harmful toxins/practices (such as asbestos, lead paint, and chamber pots being emptied onto a street). The public’s concern for health and welfare, however, is always tempered by countervailing concerns for the cost of building.

Standards and guidelines have a different status than codes. Codes are adopted and enforced by some governmental body (a country, a state, a municipality). Standards and guidelines are enforced by contract law to the extent that they are written into specifications and professional services agreements for building projects. Guidelines are generally not as refined as standards. Often some aspect of design guidance will start as a guideline, be refined into a standard, and eventually be adopted as a code. Most (but not all) green rating systems currently reside at the guideline stage, but they make reference to accepted industry standards in many performance areas in order to avoid reinventing the wheel.

In the long history of codes and standards, green rating systems were born yesterday. Mid-twentieth-century writers, such as Aldo Leopold, began to articulate a land ethic that values conserving nature, not just for what it supplies us, but for its own sake. Rachel Carson’s (1962) Silent Spring exposed how our industries produced chemicals that accumulated in wildlife and plants—to the point where human health and survival were at risk. The OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s jolted Western society and spurred the building industry to improve energy efficiency. Codes requiring better insulation and reduced infiltration/ventilation were quickly implemented (beginning with ASHRAE Standard 90-75).

With relatively little understanding of how building equipment and assemblies interacted in a complex system, these early code requirements often had the unintended consequence of producing sick building syndrome. Water vapor and off-gassing of volatile organic compounds from carpets, paints, and glues went unnoticed in leaky, well-ventilated buildings; but tight buildings allowed mold growth and chemical concentrations to trigger widespread illness. Essentially, it became clear to many that environmental responsiveness involved more than reduced energy consumption.

For many years, legislation was the primary tool of green building (green environment) advocates. The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act passed in the 1960s and 1970s allowed environmentalists to challenge development seen as threatening the environment and human health, but this approach led to a legacy of confrontation between development and the environment that lasted many decades. When a wave of concern for environmentally-responsive buildings entered the collective consciousness in the early 1990s many unsubstantiated (and unsubstantiable) claims about building (and designer) performance were made. Thus was born the idea of a green building rating system.

A Sampling of Rating Systems

BRE Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) is a voluntary rating system for green buildings that was established in the UK by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) in 1990. Since its inception, it has grown in scope and dispersed geographically, being exported in various guises across the globe. Its progeny in other regions include LEED and Green Globes in North America and Green Star in Australia.

LEED began in the United States in 1993 with the formation of a building industry coalition to promote green building strategies and shift the market toward greener products and systems. Using BREEAM as the foundation, LEED sought to dangle a carrot in front of the building industry instead of threatening it with the stick of legal action.

Version 1.0 of LEED (a voluntary, third-party rating system) set a benchmark for green buildings and addressed the growing problem of “green washing.” Buildings designed to code are sometimes described as “the worst building you can build without going to jail.” LEED upped the ante by establishing performance levels above code minimums. Since its early focus on institutional/commercial buildings, LEED has expanded its coverage to a wide range of building types. Buildings achieve LEED certification based primarily on their potential (as revealed through design and construction documentation—versus their in-use performance), and are intended to represent the upper 25 percent of the market in terms of environmental performance.

LEED has been criticized for not being based in whole or in part on actual performance. As the first rating system to achieve widespread acceptance in the United States, many believe it would not have been so widely adopted if in-situ performance tracking had been central to the ratings.

The Green Globes rating system began in 1996 as a Canadian rating system based upon BREEAM. It was adopted by the Green Building Initiative (GBI) for use in the United States in 2002, partly to provide an alternative to LEED. It is intended to provide greater flexibility to design teams with less administrative effort and cost.

The system was initially criticized for being less rigorous than LEED since it relied more on self-reporting of green measures and the governing body was seen as being influenced by industry groups that provided much of the initial funding and administration. As the standard evolved, it included more rigorous third-party review and the governing body expanded to represent broader input from the design and construction fields.

Much of the debate between advocates of LEED and Green Globes has focused on the issue of certification of wood products. LEED has historically only accepted the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification for sustainably harvested wood, while Green Globes has adopted the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) standard. SFI was developed with support from the forest products industry, and has been criticized for being less rigorous than FSC.

The Living Building Challenge was launched in 2006 and is managed by the International Living Future Institute after development by the Cascadia Region Green Building Council, a chapter of both the U.S. Green Building Council and the Canada Green Building Council. The program was conceived as a means of complementing LEED (and other rating systems) while challenging the industry to move as close to a “fully sustainable” building as possible. Using the metaphor of a flower, the Living Building Challenge (LBC) is comprised of seven performance areas or ‘Petals’: Site, Water, Energy, Health, Materials, Equity, and Beauty. Petals are subdivided into a total of twenty Imperatives, each of which focuses on a specific set of issues.

The LBC may have set the highest bar yet for green rating systems: it seeks to create buildings that, like a flower, are autonomous and regenerative. It starts with the concept of “triple-net zero” where a project generates all of its energy on site with renewable energy systems such as photovoltaic (PV) or wind, harvests all of its water from the precipitation that falls on the site, and processes all of the water and sewage that leave the site. Materials containing chemicals on a “Red List”—such as PVC, formaldehyde, and phthalates—are prohibited, except where no alternatives can be found. Rather than choosing from many optional credits, projects must demonstrate they meet all 20 program requirements by showing a full year of operating data.

As both an aspirational challenge and a tool for promoting change, the LBC allows for some exceptions where projects are unable to negotiate code exceptions or find products that meet the requirements. A limited number of projects have been certified at the time this was written; but that is to be expected for an aspirational rating system.

ASHRAE Standard 189, Standard for the Design of High-Performance Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings, was released in 2009. Its aim is to create green building guidance written in the prescriptive language and format of a standard that can be adopted as code or referenced in specifications. Developed jointly with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA), the Standard 189 committee also includes stakeholders from the design, construction, and manufacturing industries.

With many similarities to LEED, the standard represents the next step in the progression from guideline to standard to code that signals a maturing body of knowledge and practice. Standard 189 is updated on a regular basis (not necessarily the case with LEED or Green Globes) and is likely to merge with the International Green Construction Code in the near future.

The Passive House (Passiv Haus) “standard” was developed in Germany as an extension of the “super-insulation” movement of the 1970s. The standard functions much like a rating system in that it provides design guidance, a performance modeling tool, and performance requirements for air tightness that require an integrated, systems approach to building design. The objective is very high levels of energy savings. Applicable to both residential and commercial buildings, the standard calls for outstanding insulation, glazing, and envelope air-tightness performance that will allow for a drastic downsizing of climate control system capacity. Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery ensures good air quality and reduces heat losses. Many cold climate Passive Houses have been heated comfortably with a heating coil not much bigger than a hair dryer.

By focusing almost exclusively on energy efficiency and airtightness, Passive House reflects the belief that climate change is an issue that eclipses concerns such as recycled content, landscape design, or forest certification. Extensive post-occupancy research has shown Passive House modeling to be more effective than other simulations at predicting actual building energy consumption, and many of the projects have achieved 70–80 percent reductions in energy use for heating, and 50–70 percent reductions in total energy use. The Passive House standard was launched in the United States in 2006 by the Passive House Institute U.S. (PHIUS), which recently introduced climate-specific design targets that should be more appropriate for the diverse North American climate palette.

The Comprehensive Assessment System for Built Environment Efficiency (CASBEE) was developed in Japan in 2005—and was also based upon work of BREEAM and LEED. One notable difference is the creation of four rating tools to address environmental performance at four stages of the building lifecycle: pre-design, construction, existing building operations, and renovations. It was also developed to address conditions specific to Japan and Asia, and to be as simple to implement as possible. The program was developed by partners in government, academia, and industry and is managed by the JSBC (Japan Sustainable Building Consortium).

The International Green Construction Code (IgCC) represents the evolutionary sequence from a green guideline (such as LEED) to a standard (such as ASHRAE 189) to a model code (such as the International Building Code). Developed in collaboration with the USGBC, GBI, and ASHRAE, the first public draft was released in 2010. Instead of a voluntary rating system, the IgCC defines design and construction requirements that can be adopted by building authorities. It still provides flexibility to project teams by giving several options for compl...